Duplicate Photo Cleaner for iPhoto – Review

The Problem:

I discovered the “Duplicate Photo Cleaner for iPhoto” out of necessity. I keep a master collection of all my photos on my server. Photos from my cameras are collected there, and then imported into iPhoto on each of my local Macs. I do this to protect my “original” photos from any errant issues that might occur when using software to manipulate and/or organize my photos. Ideally, at any point in time, there are several exact copies of my master photo library on several computers, iCloud, Google, as well as rsync driven backups. In theory, this is a pretty good process for manipulating and organizing my photos. There is one problem though: sometimes I forget if I have imported a group of photos from the Master file on the server to an iPhoto Library on each of my local Macs. The solution is simple, trash the existing iPhoto Library, and import the whole Master file into iPhoto again to each computer. I do this a couple times a year, just to make sure everything is current. It was during one of these “recreation” sessions that I noticed a fairly large number of duplicate photos coming from my server to the local computer(s). I am sure the duplicates had been around awhile, I had just never noticed them.

What to do? I decided on a solution that would remove the duplicate photos from the local computers only. I chose not to remove duplicates from the Master file because there may well be reason why the duplicates were created in the first place (a “work” project, for example). As there were a lot of duplicates, and each duplicate or group of duplicates would require a decision to go “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, and time for me is critical, it seems logical to live with the duplicates on the Master. I started looking for software that would make the process of removing the duplicates on the Macs easy, and I found the “Duplicate Photo Cleaner for iPhoto” application on the Apple App Store (and it is FREE too!!!).

The Solution:

Here are the features (from the publisher: Systweak Software) for the Duplicate Photo Cleaner for iPhoto app:

Scans your iPhoto Library for duplicate photos (and, though I have not yet tried this, appears to scan folders not associated with iPhotos as well)

Finds duplicate videos

Finds edited copies of photos

Works fast

Displays multiple copies of the same item in clusters together in a group

Automatically keeps one copy safe in each group

Can remove all found duplicates in a click

Completely safe duplicate deletion – moves duplicates in iPhoto Trash

Can clean Trash to recover your wasted disk space

Works for OS X 10.7+

How To Use “Photo Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto”

Using Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto is pretty simple:

Open the program

Open Finder.

Open your user file

Open the Pictures file

Find the most recent file tagged “.photolibrary”

Drag this file to main body of the Duplicate Cleaner for iPhoto app

At the bottom of the app’s window, click the Scan for Duplicates button (this launches the scan, which can take several minutes, depending on the size of the “.photolibray” file.

When the scan complete, the active window will display all found duplicates, with meta-data for each one. You can let the software determine what photo in each duplicate to keep, or make that decision yourself, by clicking each photo to delete.

After reviewing the photos, click the app’s delete button. Oops, you think you deleted something in error. No problem, all deleted photos are located in iPhoto’s “Trash” folder and can be accessed just like any of iPhoto’s files from the apps “left-side” menu area.

Summary

The program is efficient, precise, easy to use, and has reasonable safe-guards. If you have a number of duplicate photos in your collection, what are you waiting for? This is the solution you have been waiting for.